Position in chronology
CUSAS 01, 177
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken clay tablet from the very earliest phase of writing in southern Mesopotamia (the Uruk period, roughly the later 4th millennium BCE). It is an administrative account — a list of quantities, marked with archaic numeral notations, tied to commodity or category signs such as 'fish,' 'reed,' and 'small/junior.' Tablets like this are among humanity's oldest bookkeeping records, tracking the movement of goods (here possibly fish rations or reed products) through an early urban economy, long before writing was used for anything but counting and accounting.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragmentary account tablet listing small quantities of goods. The first entry records '1' unit tied to a fish-ration or fish-portion notation. Further down are more numeral entries — a '2,' a combination of '1' and '1,' and other broken figures — some paired with the word 'small' or 'junior' and one with a sign that looks like 'reed.' Near the end another numeral entry is followed by a mark that may mean 'from,' perhaps indicating a source or transferring party. Much of the tablet is broken away, so the overall transaction — what commodity was being counted, for whom, and why — cannot be reconstructed with certainty; only isolated number-and-commodity pairs survive.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(N01), fish (KU6~a) — ration/mouth-portion (KA~a) 2(N02) 1(N04) 1(N02) [...], [...] 1(N02) [...] 1(N01), small/junior (TUR) [...] 1(N01), reed (GI#) X 1(N01) [...] [...] 3(N01) [...], from (TA~a) [...], [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
1(N01) , KU6~a KA~a 2(N02) 1(N58) 1(N04) 1(N02) [...] , [...] 1(N02) [...] 1(N01) , TUR [...] 1(N01) , GI# X 1(N01) [...] [...] 3(N01) [...] , TA~a [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 01, 177. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA (P325247) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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Related sources
One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.